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jones_supa writes "Things are starting to look even better for the status of open specifications for AMD Radeon HD hardware. AMD's Alex Deucher announced via his personal blog that programming guides and register specifications on the 3D engines for the Evergreen, Northern Islands, Southern Islands, and Sea Islands GPUs are now in the NDA-free public domain. These parts represent the 3D engines on the Radeon HD 5000 through Radeon HD 8000 series graphics processors."

Then you haven't been paying attention. There are three majors players: Intel, NVidia, and AMD.

NVidia has great proprietary Linux drivers but their documentation has been lacking. Open source developers do what they can with nouveau but without the full documentation, they are guessing in places. NVidia is working to make more documentation available.

AMD has better documentation but their Linux drivers have not been as good as NVidia.

Then there is Intel who has good documentation and drivers. The problem is their video cards are not as good as NVidia or AMD. If you need a basic video card with average multimedia capabilities like h264 support, Intel is good. If you want to play games with Steam, the experience might be lacking.